The Essentials of RPG Design

simoniker writes "As the latest in his Game Design Essentials series for Gamasutra, writer John Harris examines 10 games from the Western computer RPG (CRPG) tradition and 10 from the Japanese console RPG (JRPG) tradition, to figure out what exactly makes them tick. From the entry on Nethack: 'Gaining experience is supposed to carry the risk of harm and failure. Without that risk, gaining power becomes a foregone conclusion. It has reached the point where the mere act of spending time playing [most RPGs] appears to give players the right to have their characters become more powerful. The obstacles that provide experience become simply an arbitrary wall to scale before more power is granted; this, in a nutshell, is the type of play that has brought us grind, where the journey is simple and boring and the destination is something to be raced to. Nethack and many other roguelikes do feature experience gain, but it doesn't feel like grind. It doesn't because much of the time the player is gaining experience, he is in danger of sudden, catastrophic failure. When you're frequently a heartbeat away from death, it's difficult to become bored.' Harris' Game Design series has previously spanned subjects from mysterious games to open world games, unusual control schemes and difficult games."

Comments

Role Playing

[sexconker]

Real men role play with pencil and paper, or nothing at all.

Re:Role Playing

[Em Emalb]

Yeah...they do.

DM: You stand before the gates of Yoren.

Gorack the Half-troll: I'm gonna roll to see if I can get hammered drunk at the tavern.

DM: What? fine. Roll to see if you get drunk.

Trantor the Barbarian: I'm gonna attack the gate guards!

DM: Oh for fu....ok, fine. Roll to see your damage.

Gorack: Yes! I'm hammered. I'm gonna feel up the tavern wench! Can I roll to see if I squeeze boob or butt?!?

Spatula the Mage: I'm with Gorack!

DM: *snaps* ROLL IT, THEN MORANS!

Disagree strongly

[jandrese]

I disagree about nethack not having grind because it has permadeath. Permadeath in Nethack is the primary reason the game is almost entirely grind. If you ever find yourself in a situation where death is close, you are playing wrong, in order to succeed in Nethack (or any roguelike for that matter), you have to play conservatively, beating up on things that pose no threat to you while escaping anything that might pose a challenge. Even if you can beat a challenging monster 95% of the time, eventually that 5% will catch up to you and all of your progress will be erased by a small handful of bad rolls. This is why only obsessives play Nethack, nobody else has the patience to grind their way up to the godlike levels required to survive the games final challenges.

From the writeup, it sounds like the author is one of the players who never makes it past the mid teens, because he constantly takes risks with his character and will inevitably lose.

Re:Disagree strongly

[jandrese]

It may be fun (for awhile), but he's only playing the first 10% of the game over and over again. The rest of the game may as well not exist if you design it that way.

IMHO, probably the best compromise between the two is the often hated "checkpoint" system, where you can only save a set intervals. Sure this means that if you work at it long enough, you can beat the game even with "bad" playing, but it also means you can reasonably take risks and actually have fun instead of tediously grinding your way to godhood.

For a Roguelike, this could be implemented as an autosave every time you go down a level, with death resulting in a restart at the beginning of the level. Sure it will take the "challenge" out of picking up random potions of Blindness or Weakness and having to drink them because there's no good way to identify them otherwise (scrolls of identify being considerably more rare than the random potions you will pick up), but that is not exactly a loss that I would mourn.

I know people will argue that "but if you beat the game you won't feel the need to play it anymore!", but to be honest after a few bullcrap deaths in most Roguelikes, I don't feel like playing them anymore anyway. I'd wager that 90+% of the people who have ever played Nethack have never seen more than the first dozen levels or so, and have not played it nearly as long as a traditional RPG.

Re:Not just RPGs

[GMFTatsujin]

Wait till you get to 36. I could barely bring myself to finish reading your post.

(Joking! Joking! Don't hit an old man!)